The station, at this hour, is practically deserted. But in a moment I hear the wailing of onrushing wheels, metal on metal, and simultaneously I pick up the blasting impact of a phalanx of minds all rushing toward me at once out of the north, packed aboard the five or six cars of the oncoming train. The compressed souls of those passengers form a single inchoate mass, pressing insistently against me. They quiver like trembling jellylike bites of plankton squeezed brutally together in some oceanographer’s net, creating one complex organism in which the separate identities of all are lost. As the train glides into the station I am able to pick up isolated blurts and squeaks of discrete selfhood: a fierce jab of desire, a squawk of hatred, a pang of regret, a sudden purposeful inner mumbling, rising from the confusing totality the way odd little scraps and stabs of melody rise from the murky orchestral smear of a Mahler symphony. The power is deceptively strong in me today. . . . But I’m not deceived into thinking that the decline in my ability has been checked. . . . When one knows that something is dying inside one, one learns not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment. Today the power is strong yet tomorrow I may hear nothing but distant tantalizing murmurs.
- Title: Dying Inside
- Author: Robert Silverberg
- Genre: Science Fiction
- Year: 1972
David Selig is a freak, David Selig is a superman. He reads minds, absolutely and effortlessly and at great distance and with the kind of penetrative thoroughness that ensures he knows more about you than you do. David Selig is a wretch, David Selig is a failure. Sampling a thousand vicarious lives, he’s never learned to live his own. Ransacking minds, he’s never been alone. But as Selig creeps past forty the gift is fading, and Dying Inside is his account of the loss of this amazing and inexplicable part of himself.
Dying Inside is rightly hailed as one of Silverberg’s best novels, and it is only one of a handful of very strong offerings that comprised the second phase of Silverberg’s career, when the prolific but workmanlike writer of adventure SF suddenly switched gears to produce psychologically thoughtful New Wave specfic novels such as Thorns, Hawksbill Station, and The Book of Skulls. Dying Inside was published the same year as The Book of Skulls, and both are psychological novels that take place in the modern America of their time. Both novels are Silverberg’s closest foray into the world of contemporary literature, with Dying Inside as perhaps the more perfectly integrated hybrid of SF and literary techniques.
The novel is told in the first person by Selig, whose narrative voice bounces between the poles of cynical-yet-flippant fatalism, clinical detachment, and bleak despair. That alone is reason enough to read this novel as Silverberg crafts a completely authentic voice, the thoughts of a character at once insufferable and tragically vulnerable. Selig is a weak and frightened man, but he is a highly educated and erudite one, and the continual seasoning of his story with high culture references only reinforces how divided and powerless his character is — for all his quoting of Eliot or Shakespeare or Aldous Huxley, it is apparent that Selig himself is a man without answers. Just as his telepathic power provides his every justification and sense of self, Selig’s knowledge, and in particular his store of poetry, is often flung up as a kind of shield, as a way of expressing that which he cannot even begin to articulate. All of this serves as a distancing device, highlighting Selig’s fundamental problem — that he does not know himself, does not know what he is outside of his vanishing gift.
Which is precisely why a novel about a telepath can be an expression of normal human truths. Selig has squandered his power; as he enters middle age he is alone, barely scraping by on what he makes ghosting term papers for college students at his old alma mater. Here his telepathy is of some use, as he probes the minds of his clients to establish the best and most believable manner to counterfeit their writing. Again, this is Selig living another’s life, using both his power and his old collection of term papers to squeak by. But his power is deserting him, and some days it’s not there at all. Dying Inside address this notion of squandered potential profoundly, and does so not as a cautionary tale, but as an enlargement on the tragedy of the human condition.
Dying Inside is a slim volume, much of which is told as episodes from David Selig’s past. We glimpse his precocious yet miserable childhood, where the obvious joys of a mindreading child are coupled with the lost innocence of contact with so many tired adult minds. Selig’s adopted sister is the only link he preserves with this past, and their relationship — based on her full knowledge of what he is — is a cornerstone of the book, as they gradually learn to accept one another. Two of Selig’s important past relationships with women are shown, both sabotaged because of his gift, though each in a very different way. And Nyquist, the only other telepath Selig has ever met, looms over sections of the book like an anti-Selig — a man who uses his telepathy as a tool to get what he wants and suffers not a jot for it. All of these past episodes in Selig’s life construct a character that is knowable to the reader despite his unthinkable power, and it is apparent that Selig’s plight is not alien to our own experience.
In the end, the inevitable does occur — as was necessary from page one. Selig’s apotheosis is an especially beautiful one, as Silverberg takes the character to the lowest depths of humiliation and then truly shows the reader just what it is that Selig will be missing for, as Selig uses his power one last time to see into the mind of a man that pities and despises him with the utmost contempt, he is transported with a profound and ecstatic joy. For it’s not those surface thoughts that matter, it never was, it was the rapture of true togethernesses, of true knowing, that happened whenever David Selig linked his mind with the mind of another. Beyond the powerlessness and need to redefine himself, it’s the aloneness that Selig feared. The aloneness we all must face.
Dying Inside is a book that takes the tragic rather than the triumphant view, though it is not without a note of hope. It is also about time, about growing old with the promise of youth unfulfilled, about the weight of potential and how it alone can be enough to crush or paralyze a person. Ultimately, too, it’s about coming to terms, about accepting what cannot be changed, about living the life we have and being who we must. It is unquestionably a classic, a must-read from one of SF’s Grandmasters.
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